Jericho Falling

by Jaleta Clegg

  "New hire," I said. "The offices are closed. We'll register him in the morning."

  The guard's face grew a leering grin. Instead of kicking him where it would hurt, I mentally shrugged. If it got us through without further questions, let him think what he wanted.

  "I'll be off in an hour," the guard said. "You could have waited."

  "You're not my type." I took the stranger's hand and pulled him after me onto the landing field.

  I waited until we were out of sight of the guards before dropping his hand. He was limping again.

  "What's your name?" I asked, as much because I wanted to know as to distract him. The ship was still a ways away.

  He stopped, staggering. His face became more confused. "I can't remember. You don't know me, do you?" I watched the last shreds of hope fade in his eyes. "I saw you and knew I knew you. I hoped you would have answers for me."

  "What can you remember?" I took his hand again, tugging him into motion.

  "Tonight. I remember the street where I found you. I can't remember anything else." His voice faded, rough and ragged with weariness. He stumbled into me. I reacted automatically, my arm going around his waist to catch him.

  "Not much farther," I said as we wove our way to my ship. I hoped we looked like a couple of spacers that had drunk a bit much.

  He didn't say anything more. His face was pasty gray. He needed help and soon. I tried to go faster. He couldn't keep up, his limp more pronounced. I supported most of his weight, glad he was slender and only a few inches taller than me. Not slender, I realized as I shifted my arm. He was gaunt, I could feel his ribs under my hand.

  The hatch to my ship was open, soft light spilled out into the night. I heard Jasyn's laugh. Clark said something too low for me to catch. It sounded so normal, so peaceful. I hated to bring more trouble. I didn't have anywhere else to go with this nameless stranger. The necklace provided a connection I couldn't ignore.

  We stumbled up to the hatch. He tried to walk, tried to open his eyes. He had no reserves left. He sagged, his whole weight falling onto me as we crossed into the ship. I couldn't hold him. We sank to the floor.

  Jasyn sat at the table, her nail file suspended over one hand. Jerimon held a deck of cards half shuffled. Clark stood behind me in the galley. He calmly reached for the door controls and shut the hatch.

  They all looked at me, waiting for an explanation.

  "He's our new engineer," I said.

  The man stirred. He looked up at me. "Jericho," he whispered. Then passed out.

  Chapter 3

  "I can't wait to hear your explanation for that statement," Jasyn said.

  "I'm not sure I want to," Jerimon said. "Can't you stay out of trouble for more than a few weeks, Dace?"

  Clark knelt next to me and checked the man. Clark was the only one of us with any kind of medical training. I shifted the man's head off my lap onto the floor.

  "What's his name?" Jerimon asked as he dealt out a hand of solitaire.

  "I don't have any idea," I answered.

  "Is he really an engineer?" Jasyn asked.

  "I don't know."

  "What do you know?" She didn't sound very happy about the situation.

  "Men were shooting at him. He said he knew me. And he showed me this." I reached for the necklace. It wasn't in my hand. It wasn't in a pocket. "He had one of those butterfly necklaces, like the ones in the hold. I must have dropped it."

  Clark sat back. "Help me get him into the med unit," he said to me.

  "What are we going to do with him?" Jasyn asked.

  "I thought about sending Lowell a message," I said. "Let him sort this out."

  "That sounds too sensible for you, Dace." Jerimon winced when Jasyn kicked him under the table.

  We picked the man up and carried him into the end cabin where the med unit was located. Clark hooked it up and started it scanning. Jasyn leaned in the doorway, watching.

  "If there were people shooting at him," Jerimon said, "how long until they start shooting at us?"

  "We're leaving in the morning," Jasyn said. "The only real question is whether we're taking him with us or not."

  Jerimon gathered his cards. "You left out: What is his name? Who is he? Why is he being chased? Who's chasing him? And the biggest question: How did Dace manage to get mixed up in his problems?"

  "I owe him, Jerimon."

  "You don't even know who he is," Jerimon objected.

  "He had one of those necklaces. There's only one person he could have gotten it from. He claims he doesn't remember anything before tonight. He says he knows me but doesn't remember how or where. He's not familiar to me, at all."

  "So, because he happened to own a piece of jewelry like the ones we were given, we're going to help him and most likely get ourselves into trouble doing it," Jerimon said.

  "You're welcome to leave anytime," I said.

  Jasyn came to my defense. "Dace is right. We owe an obligation to him. At least until he's recovered. How bad is he?" she asked Clark.

  "Mostly exhaustion and no food," Clark answered. "He's got some older bruises and scrapes. Nothing serious. Give him time to sleep and something to eat."

  "We still know nothing about him," Jerimon said.

  "We can't call him hey you," Jasyn said.

  "Call him Jericho," I said. "He told me to seek the retreat of the silver lady. I have no clue what he meant by that. Or what Jericho might be."

  "Life was too quiet for you?" Clark asked, with a smile.

  "I don't go borrowing trouble, or even looking for it."

  "Fate," Jasyn said and shrugged. "Lady Rina said your future was one of the strangest and most dangerous she'd ever seen." Jasyn took my hands and turned them palm up. "The future in your hands."

  "You don't really believe it, do you?" I asked.

  She shrugged again, setting her long dark hair rippling over her shoulder. "There are more mysteries hidden in the palm of your hand than could be explained in a lifetime. Those who know how can read the answers."

  "You spent too much time talking with Lady Rina on Besht," Clark said. "Dace was wise to keep her distance."

  "Skeptic," Jasyn threw at her husband. Clark grinned.

  Lady Rina claimed she could read someone's future in their palms or in her cards, a gift Gypsies had been born with since before humans began to travel in space. Since that time was so distant in the past that it was legend, I wasn't sure how to believe what she said.

  Jasyn let my hands go. I rubbed my palms across my shipsuit. I still felt the tingling of whatever Jericho had done to me earlier.

  "Are we headed for Landruss?" Clark asked.

  "We have a cargo," I answered. "After that, who knows?" We had taken over the regular route of one of the Gypsy Family ships while it was undergoing repairs. We did them a favor and they did us one by giving us work for a while. Landruss was the last leg of the trip before the Mary Sue returned to service.

  Clark glanced at his watch. "The cargo will be here in about an hour." Middle of the night planet time meant little or nothing on a ship. We kept our own time. "We're scheduled to leave at dawn."

  "If we leave earlier, it will look suspicious," Jasyn said.

  "She's corrupted both of you," Jerimon said.

  "As she said, brother," Jasyn leaned over Jerimon, "you can leave whenever you want. I haven't forgotten how much trouble you got us into with Targon."

  "That wasn't my fault, it was Lowell's. And no one else will hire me." It was harsh, but it was the truth. He had a criminal record and a suspended pilot's license. "Besides, I'd miss out on all the fun. Who's the silver lady?"

  Jasyn sat at the table. "Lady Rina might know. I'll have to ask her next time we swing by Besht."

  Clark went to fetch the cargo manifest. He'd taken over the role of cargo handler. He was good at it.

  Jerimon dealt out a two handed game. Jasyn picked up her cards.

  I went back in the end cabin and stood over Jericho. His face was strained, exhaust
ed and hunted even in sleep. I guessed his age to be late twenties, possibly thirties. The variations between races were too great to tell any closer without more information. I wasn't likely to get much from him. He was an enigma. My curiosity was at full alert.

  Ghost, our cat, appeared from nowhere. She jumped to the bunk, lifting without effort. She sniffed at Jericho's face then settled down, curled up in the hollow of his neck. Ghost approved. It was stupid, but I felt better about bringing him onto the ship.

  I helped Clark shift cargo. The night air was pleasantly cool. I caught the faint scent of flowers on the breeze as I moved crates into the hold. I tried to keep watch while I worked. There was no sign of Jericho's attackers, no indication they knew he was on my ship.

  Maybe we would be able to slip away, I thought. Hope rises eternal.

  We strapped the cargo down and balanced the load. The sky overhead was just beginning to pale with the coming dawn when we finished.

  Jerimon was finishing up the preflight checks. Jasyn was working on a course. Clark put away the loose items in the lounge. I ducked into the engine room to run a last check on our flaky stabilizer. I had an assistant engineer's rating, which was why I was the one fixing the parts that broke. We were dodging rules not having a fully certified engineer on board. Without the Guild to back us, we had to find one soon or risk facing fines.

  "We've got clearance, whenever we're ready," Jasyn said as I took the pilot's seat.

  "We're secure," Clark said, taking the fourth chair in the cockpit.

  "Let's go," I said and started the engine warming up.

  We let Jerimon fly, despite his suspended license. He was a very good pilot. As long as no one found out, it wasn't a problem.

  We were busy for the next hour as we got the ship off the ground and steered through the traffic around Verrus. Jasyn set the course for Landruss. The jump to hyperspace went smoothly. The ship flew well, despite the port stabilizer. We shut down the sublight drive and secured the controls.

  Jerimon yawned. "Good night," he said and headed for his cabin.

  Clark and Jasyn headed for their cabin.

  I sat alone in the cockpit, thinking as I watched colored streaks of energy wash over the viewscreen.

  I swung my chair around and accessed the ship's library. I typed in silver lady and got exactly nothing back. I tried Jericho. There was a very brief entry regarding an ancient ruin. No one knew anything much about Jericho other than the name and a tumble of stones on a distant world. I knew nothing about the man Jericho lying in a bunk on my ship other than that he was desperate and he somehow knew my face.

  I tried a dozen other words and phrases before I gave up. Our library just didn't have the information I needed. I shut down the screen and checked the ship status again. It wasn't necessary for us to stand watch, usually we didn't. Old habits still made me nervous to leave the ship totally unattended in flight. I was Academy trained. The Patrol had a rule that no ship was ever in operation without at least one person in the cockpit in front of the controls. The Patrol wasn't flying freighters, though. Commercial rules were less strict. Everything was green.

  Our ship had four cabins to the right of the lounge, across from the hatch. Mine was the one right behind the cockpit. Clark and Jasyn shared the next one. Jerimon had taken the one behind that. The last one, the one closest to the small cargo bay, held the med unit and our mysterious passenger.

  I leaned in the doorway, watching him. The ship was dim, the lights turned to night levels. His face was shadowy. He was deeply asleep. The unit showed a steady heartbeat and breathing. Clark had set the alarm to let us know when he woke up, or when the rhythms changed. His eyelids flickered, his lips twitched in a dream.

  "Jericho," he whispered in his sleep.

  "I wish I knew what it meant," I whispered back.

  He didn't respond. I went to my cabin to sleep. Maybe when I woke up I'd have some answers. I wasn't counting on it.

  I dreamed about giant fish with human mouths. They were trying to tell me something, but the water distorted their voices until I couldn't understand them. I woke my usual morning self, which meant I was groggy and grumpy. I stumbled out of my cabin to find a drink, preferably hot.

  Jasyn was in the galley stirring something that smelled absolutely wonderful. We'd splurged on the ship, installing a complete galley so we didn't have to eat the freeze-dried dinners most spacers lived on. Jasyn loved to cook, and she was very good at it. Clark and Jerimon weren't bad, either. By unspoken agreement, none of them ever let me cook. I'd burn water.

  Jasyn handed me a steaming mug without comment. I plopped into a chair at the table and took a sip. Warmth spread through me, tasting of spices. I rolled the next sip over my tongue, trying to place the flavors. By the time I finished the mug, I was awake enough to be civil and still trying to figure out which spices Jasyn had used.

  "I give up," I said, handing the mug back for more. "What is it?"

  "I picked it up in the market on Verrus. Orange spice drink. They don't list the individual spices." She handed me the canister. "Our guest woke up about half an hour ago. Clark's been talking to him."

  As if on cue, Clark and Jericho came out of the end cabin.

  Jericho had showered and wore one of Clark's shipsuits. It hung on him. He nodded shyly to Jasyn. His eyes fixed on my face. He stared, an intense searching look. "I know you, but I can't remember where we met."

  "What do you remember?" I asked.

  He sat, lowering himself gingerly into a chair, as if afraid it would vanish if he sat too hard. "I remember last night. Running in the dark. Finding you. Knowing I should I know you." Jasyn put a steaming mug in front of him. He wrapped long, narrow fingers around it. "Thank you."

  "You're welcome." Jasyn pulled bread rolls from the warmer. Her latest invention was a soft dough wrapped around various fillings. She put the plate on the table.

  "Thank you, all of you," Jericho said. "Where are we going?" Where are you taking me and why? His eyes were full of questions.

  "What's your name?" I picked up a roll and bit into it. The filling this time was a sweet fruit mixture.

  He stared into his mug, as if hoping the answer would float up in the orange spice drink.

  "What does Jericho mean?" I asked.

  He twitched. His eyes went blank, gazing down at his mug. "It's a code word." He shook his head in frustration. "It's there, in my head. I can't get to it. I'm sorry."

  "Eat something," Jasyn urged him.

  Clark hadn't waited, he was eating the rolls as fast as I was. Jasyn took three from the plate and handed them to Jericho.

  "Save some for Jerimon," she scolded us.

  "He sleeps late, he gets his own breakfast," I said through a mouthful of roll.

  "These are the best yet," Clark said as he picked up another one.

  Jasyn ate one, leaning against the galley counter. "We should have added more seating last time we rebuilt the ship. Maybe a couch over there." She waved at the far wall.

  The lounge was too small for any more seating. We'd changed out the table from one that seated four to one that could seat eight. We only had six chairs, though. There used to be a cushioned bench behind the cockpit. Jasyn had removed it when we remodeled the lounge. Nobody had objected. I carefully didn't look at the wall above the shelves that replaced it. The holes where Darien Harris had installed chains still showed. He was dead. Those nightmares wouldn't haunt me anymore, I wouldn't let them. The only problem was now we had nowhere to sit except at the table.

  "If we moved the door to your cabin over," Jasyn mused, "and moved ours the other way, we could squeeze in something between them."

  "How about we open up one of the cabins," I said, "shift it the other way. We could add a sitting area to the lounge. We'd lose one cabin, but we aren't using it anyway."

  "We could move the cleaner," Clark suggested, getting into the spirit of the discussion. "Put it in the end cabin."

  "Since we'll probably never ha
ve a full crew," I said, "we could lose those bunks. But then where would Ghost sit?"

  The cat was up in her favorite perch, a ledge above the cleaner. She twitched her tail and squeezed her eyes shut in a catly affirmation of her superiority over us lowly humans.

  "I could paint a new mural," Jasyn said, cocking her head to the side and studying the blank walls between the cabin doors. The wall behind her was covered with paintings. The fronts of the cabinets behind the cockpit were done with forest scenes, animals and plants borrowed from dozens of worlds in a landscape that could never exist in reality. Flower vines twined over the hatch. They opened into a waterfall that spilled down the wall. An ocean landscape filled the area around the galley. Colorful fish swam beneath the waves, while birds flew above.

  "What this time?" Clark asked. He leaned back in his chair, sipping the drink.

  "The skies of Perlion," she said, with a smile. We'd managed to make a stop there, on that fabled playground of the very rich and influential. She and Clark had finagled a way to go sightseeing. It hadn't cost us anything, Lowell had paid us to deliver personal packages there. He couldn't justify sending official Patrol packages with us, even if I did technically work for him. He'd paid the sum I charged him without even blinking. The sunsets had been spectacular. The trace gases in the upper atmosphere gave it a sparkling luminescence unmatched anywhere else in the Empire, a jeweled display of deep reds and pinks and golds and purples washing over and through the deep blue of the sky.

  Jericho stared into his mug while we talked, a deep frown marking his face.

  I licked jam from my fingers. "How about hammocks? We could hang them from the ceiling. I've heard they're very relaxing."

  "Recliners in the cockpit?" Clark said, grinning.

  "Now you're getting silly," Jasyn said.

  Jerimon's cabin door finally slid open. He leaned in the open doorway, hair tousled and feet bare.

  "You missed breakfast," Jasyn said. "I managed to save two rolls for you."

  "How can I bribe you to make more?" Clark asked.

  She leaned over to whisper in his ear. His grin got wider.